Online Process Management at GBI / part 1
Business Process Management Life Cycle
An entire life cycle sounds like a lot to work on. But isn’t that too ambitious and challenging for us? And how is “life” related to IT? As one of the students of Hochschule Harz University of Applied Sciences in Wernigerode, Germany, I sit staring at “our” Business Process Life Cycle which, in this case, consists of 5 big steps. Our professor Dr. Hans Scheruhn is presenting them and excitedly running back and forth in front of our student group trying to get us enthusiastic about his plan. Well, perhaps our SAP class will be dealing with interesting stuff for the next two semesters and not only strategically plan and improve business processes of a “live” company but also implement and control them. Maybe using SAP ERP will be fun? Somehow it feels fascinating that lots of the SAP students from all over the world might have heard of our joint company. Its name is Global Bike Inc (GBI) and its employees are all those students who have been executing the GBI case studies in the past.
Please click on the GBI Enterprise Sustainability Balanced Scorecard for higher resolution !
But with that long path ahead of us, how and where will we start our journey? Well perhaps we should listen to the Chinese who say “Every long journey begins with the first step”. So let’s get to know the GBI and its business processes which we are going to analyze first. At this early stage of the trip we find working with SAP ERP simulations at GBI very helpful.
GBI Enterprise Model
After reading and executing the GBI case study documents and by simultaneously navigating through the GBI as-is enterprise model we got a first glance of what the GBI is all about. The enterprise model consists of different model types like organizational charts, value added chain diagrams as well as business vocabulary of GBI and much more useful information about our company. It had been created for us in advance to better understand the structure of SAP ERP and how SAP ERP is used at GBI. The different models were designed and integrated by our professor Dr. Hans Scheruhn and Brita Thielert of the Hochschule Harz University and by Stefan Weidner of the SAP University Competence Center Magdeburg using the ARIS Business Designer synchronized with the Business Blueprint of our SAP Solution Manager.
How well our internal customer relationships will work you’ll see in the upcoming blog posts in this series.
Look forward to the next steps of your GBI journey! Thanks for sharing your insights!
For all readers not familiar with the GBI model company and dataset I am posting the link to the download area for the current Intro to ERP curriculum material (download for SAP University Alliances members only):
https://cw.sdn.sap.com/cw/docs/DOC-150351
Having the students blog about their experiences with the GBI challenge, is an interesting idea worthy of being continued in the semesters to come. Reading this also reminds me of my own SAP classes at Harz University more than a decade ago, when excitement and pacing back and fourth in front of the class were already the hallmarks of the instructor.
Hi all, I know these posts are dated, but my class loves the ARIS GBI model and it seems to be down. I have tried reaching out.... any body know where I can continue to access the ARIS GBI model?